RLZ to RLY? Yes, I went there. It was too low hanging a fruit.

So I was about to include a search URL in some comments in some code I was writing and noted this RLZ value on the querystring. Interesting. It was clearly compressed data, and not human readable. Wth?

?rlz and privacy - Google Chrome Help:

You may notice a RLZ parameter in the URL when you do a Google search from the Google Chrome address bar. The RLZ parameter contains some encoded information (like when you downloaded Google Chrome and where you got it from). The RLZ parameter does not uniquely identify you nor is it used to target advertising. Google uses this information in aggregate to find out whether groups of people are using Google Chrome actively.


Yeah, but what if I start mailing out the URL? Doesn't that give someone an idea that it's mine? And if I use the search results to get to someone's page, isn't that RLZ on the referring page info? Maybe not. I can't recall. But if it is, that's bad.

Don't personally tag my URLs, plz. Maybe you don't record my id with them, but someone else can. It's just A Bad Idea in general.